Week 3 Seminar Notes Gp2
Seminar Outline 1. HOUSEKEEPING (17.30-17.40) 2. ESTABLISH PARTICIPATION CRITERIA (17.40-17.50) 3. INTERCULTURAL TEAMS (17.55-18.10) 4. INDIVIDUAL RAT (17.55-18.10) 5. TEAM RAT (18.10-18.30) 6. CHALLENGES (18.30-18.40) 7. "WHY" QUESTIONS & DISCUSSION - ISSUES/THEMES FROM READINGS/RATs (18.40-19.00) 8. HISTORICAL DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE (19.10-19.20) 9. ACTIVITY/APPLICATIONS – CHINESE NATIONAL IDENTITY; OZ/SINGAPOREAN NATIONAL IDENTITY (19.20-20.15) Key Seminar Topics/Questions Reading tip : try to read the first topic sentence of each paragraph and the conclusion to get a better understanding of the reading (see week 2 notes). Critical Case Study - due date rescheduled for 31 August. An email notification will be sent. This is worth 15% of your grade. Begin thinking of a cultural artefact that you want to analyze for the Critical Case Study. Examples discussed in class were Hello Kitty, America's Next Top Model and Film fests. Expectations of Diigo and Wikia usage Wiki : Edit; Comment on readings; Post queries and questions; Contribute points/notes (glossary); Brainstorm or propose research questions for team projects. Diigo: Share Bookmarks; Visit and read other bookmarks. For the Clueless :Diigo = http://www.diigo.com/index Wikia = http://internationalcommunicationculture.wikia.com/wiki/International_Communication_%26_Culture_Wiki Igoogle = http://www.google.com/ig (I recommend this as a tool to gather all of your information) Discussion about "The 10 conditions of Love" - Topic for the discussion "Does the documentary represent a threat for/to Chinese national identity?" - About the movie "Rebiya Kadeer spent six years in a Chinese prison before being exiled to Washington DC. An tireless advocate for the independence of her oil-rich Uyghur homeland – known as East Turkestan – she has been punished at every turn by the Chinese authorities, who have now condemned two of her sons to lengthy prison sentences. Rising from obscurity and poverty to become the seventh richest person in China and two-time Nobel Prize-nominee, Kadeer is an extraordinary woman driven by a fierce commitment to her cause. Australian filmmaker Jeff Daniels follows Kadeer in her relentless campaign for her people’s autonomy, documenting the life of a fearless woman who has paid a terrible price for becoming an international symbol of her nation’s struggle. Rebiya Kadeer is a guest of the Festival." (MIFF official website: http://www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au/content/341/film_id/13847.html) - Debates regarding this movie NEEDS WORK; NEEDS CLARIFICATION Culture is often linked to the idea of civilisation and moral and intellectual development. It is often spread by various communication methods especially mass media. It is also said to expose a person to the imagined community. New Asian: people in a country or culture that is very much influenced by Western modernity but remain Asian at the very core. The example of 'New Asian' would be people of Singapore. they accommodate the consequences of Western modernity but remain Asian at their very core, as Chinese, Indian and Malay who carry their own long historical memories and tradition. (Second Reading, p. 190) "Imagined community" - In charge of its doings, political and legal structures and welfare of its citizens and has finite, albeit elastic, borders or boundaries. - Nations are represented a new way of apprehending everyday experience of the world. The imagining of nation is possible because of an understanding of the steady, onward movement of homogenous, shared time, and consumption is being replicated simultaneously by countless, anonymous others. Imagined communities arose and developed with the ubiquity of reproducible, commoditised communications artefacts, Orientalism is the cultural Othering of the "East" by the "West" in order to provide the West with a sense of moral legitimacy and is both unsettled and reinforce through the articulation of Singaporean identity. Glossary ' Bourgeoisie': *Noun The middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes. ( Dictionary.com ) ' Marxism': is the political philosophy and practice derived from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism is a political-economic theory that presents a materialist conception of history, a non-capitalist vision of capitalism and other types of society, and a non-religious view of human liberation. Closely related to the ideology of communism. At its core, Marxism holds a critical analysis of capitalism and a theory of social change. The original Marxian vision consisted of three complementary parts, each of which is hard to separate from the other two: The dialectical and materialist conception of history. Marx interpreted the history of any society as being the result of conflicts within society, including those between social classes (e.g., bourgeoisie and proletariat) and between the development of the forces of production (technology, the labor force, etc.) and the relations of production (institutions). Accordingly, a society's possible futures are interpreted in terms of these conflicts. The critique of capitalism. Capitalism is seen as a society in which a small minority of the population (the bourgeoisie or capitalists) dominates and exploits the vast majority (the working class or proletariat). In Marx's labor theory of value, workers typically have no choice but produce more value and more output than is necessary to pay the cost of their reproduction as people in society over time. They do this under conditions that they do not control, i.e., under the direction of the supervisors and threatened by unemployment or poverty rather than following democratic decision-making, and thus give the surplus-product to the owners, the bourgeoisie. The capitalists then use this surplus (also called surplus value) to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Often, this accumulation goes 'too far', causing an economic crisis. The theory of revolution. In Marx's conception, workers under capitalism are alienated since they do not control a major portion of their day (the working-day) and must follow orders, producing goods or services that they do not own and cannot choose to avoid producing. They are alienated from their own true selves as members of society and from nature. The solution -- which Marx saw as existing below the surface of actual bourgeois society -- was for workers to unite in labor union and political parties, to take political and economic power away from the bourgeoisie. In fact, he saw this kind of collective self-liberation as the only true liberation of the working class. The powerful and innovative analytical methods Marx introduced (materialist dialectics, the labor theory of value, etc.) have influenced a broad range of disciplines. In the 21st century, Marxist approaches have a theoretical presence in the Western academic fields of archaeology, anthropology,1 media studies,2 political science, theater, history, sociological theory, education, economics,3 literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy.4 (Wikipedia) Sui Generis: *Adjective - Unique (Mac Dictionary) Coterminous:* Adjective - Having the same boundaries or extent in space, time or meaning. {No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind} (Mac Dictionary) Bourdieusian page 509 from week 4 reading Brook, S 2008 'Cultural capital and cultural diversity: some problems in Ghassan Hage's account of cosmopolitan multiculturalism' Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist. Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations. He used methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines, specially philosophy, sociology and anthropology. His best known book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that judgments of taste are related to social position. His argument is put forward by an original combination of social theory and data from surveys, photographs and interviews, in an attempt to reconcile difficulties such as how to understand the subject within objective structures. In the process, he tried to reconcile the influences of both external social structures and subjective experience on the individual (see structure and agency). One of the principal players in French intellectual life, Bourdieu became the "intellectual reference" for movements opposed to neo-liberalism and globalisation that developed in France and elsewhere during the 1990s.1 (Wikipedia) Allomorphism: variability without change in existing constitution. Translation Anderson quotes the historian Ernest Renan on page 6 of the reading: "Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses." English: "Now, the essential thing in a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common and also that all of them have properly forgotten certain things." The quote continues: "Tout citoyen françois doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siécle." English: "It is possible to be a French citizen only by having forgotten Saint Barthélemy, and the massacres of the Midi in the thirteenth century."